this should be a very easy election to win. her opponent is an imbecile. she doesn't need to pull off all these sophisticated triangulations. she just needs to run on a simple message about the economy.
the average american is not going to read this and think that america needs to unite against the russians. they're going to read this and think that she's so incompetent on national security that she can't even keep the russians out of her campaign communications.
this will backfire. dramatically. it's the only narrative that trump could possibly win on, and they're handing it to him.
did the russians steal the information? it's not unlikely. the russians are in and out of american servers all day long. so are the chinese. and, the amercians are in and out of russian and chinese servers all the time, too.
at any given moment, any of the major governments can hack into just about anything. that's the reality.
the fbi knows that....
voters don't know that.
so, blowing up the story like this has to be political in some way or another. it's really not actually a story.
the question is what the political purpose is.
i was talking a while back about the deep state trying to take her down on fears of her being compromised, herself. i guess i can't rule that out.
more likely to me is that this is clinton playing out her neo-con fantasies in building up an enemy to unite against. but, again that's just not what people are going to think.
they're just going to see the russians walking all over her: weak leadership, weak on national security....weak. weak. weak.
that ipsos "poll" may seem like things are back to normal, but it is also an "online poll" and consequently just as worthless as the one out of california the other day that had trump up by 7. ipsos has done a lot of polling in canada and is consistently nowhere near the outcome. they're literally worthless as prognosticators. i wouldn't even aggregate them. i wouldn't even report on them. i may even say i'd blacklist them from coverage.
i know that people will point to cell phones as a problem with polling, and a lot of the concerns they point to were at one point valid, but online "polling" is simply not a way forward. the best polling firms have actually found ways to poll cell phones and don't really see it as a serious barrier anymore.
the problem with the online polling is that there's no concept of randomness. the math underlying polling needs a random sample to make any sense. you can basically take anything with a "credibility interval" and toss it in the trash - the correct credibility interval for an online poll is not credible. ever. if it's close, it's by chance.
the rcp average is consequently just a polluted mess that should be avoided. i don't know if they've addressed this or written about it. but, they shouldn't be aggregating credible polling with this online propaganda-generation bullshit.
what that means is that the number of polls you should take seriously is a lot smaller than the media is going to throw at you. when the media throws a poll at you, immediately check to see if it's telephone polling or an "online panel" and respond accordingly.
the reason they report "credibility intervals" is that they can't measure error because the sample isn't random. it's just a pr tactic to make "online polling" look more scientific than it is.
it is not the same thing as a margin of error. don't be confused by this.
these people should write an open letter to the people of wisconsin, apologizing for their bad judgement.
Anarcho-Communist Cookbook
It's not a dodge if you genuinely dislike both of them.
jessica
that's right. if i tell you that they're both the same and it doesn't matter, you can disagree with me and tell me i'm wrong. but, don't tell me i'm dodging the question. it's just disingenuous. i really, honestly don't think that hillary is preferable to trump. i'm sorry. we can disagree. but that's how it is.
Dribrom Sunrock
I honestly do not think there will be a next election year if Trump get elected. I'm quite sure he will declare marshal law and say that there will be no more elections until "we have figured things out". I'm not taking any chances. At least I trust Hillary not to burn down the world as we know it during the next 4 years. Voting for a 3rd party is just a too big of a risk IMO. But we should not kid yourself here the house of Representatives will not vote for a 3rd party.
jessica
you can't even spell martial law.
as an aside, a marshall plan for the united states would probably be a good idea.
the way the single-party state has people brainwashed is really astounding. do you realize that the republican party has it's own voters worked up in exactly the same way? that they think hillary will declare an executive order on day one to seize everybody's guns and officially usher in the New World Order(tm)?
this is not even within the realm of constitutional possibility. we will have continuing creeping fascism one way or the other: they're both fascists, after all. but, trump would not actually be legally able to do any of the things you're fantasizing about.
it's far more likely that trump will spend 350 days a year on the golf course.
"fuck this. i'm outta here."
i want to be clear, because i suspect that this is democratic party propaganda: it's not believable. it's laughable. trump couldn't tell his dog to sit. you're running against charlie chaplin, and you're trying to paint him as hitler. it is so unbelievable - so ridiculous - that it may backfire to the point that it is the reason you lose.
the way you beat a guy like trump is that you expose his poor leadership qualities. you don't broadcast him as a strong leader.
"don't vote for my opponent, guys. he's a strong leader. vote for me. i'm less of a leader."
trump is the corrupt, absent ceo. he's the guy that takes credit for the work other people do. he's the lazy, do-nothing, loafer that inherited his dad's job. he doesn't care about anything except his golf game. he'll fiddle while the empire burns. he's corrupt. he's inept. he's incompetent.
if your propaganda comes off as b grade horror film trash, that's the reaction you're going to get to it: that the campaign is unprofessional. amateur. you want the campaign to be like army of darkness? then expect to lose.
just run on the economy. look at his tax policies. they're idiotic. even most republicans can figure that out. Dribrom Sunrock
It would not be the first time it have happened in USA. During the Civil War, Lincoln continually violated the Constitution, in some cases suspending the entire Constitution that he swore to uphold.
On September 29, 2006, President George W. Bush signed the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2007 (H.R. 5122). The law expanded the President’s authority to declare Martial Law under revisions to the Insurrection Act and actually allowed the President to take charge of National Guard troops without state governor authorization.
While certain aspects of the bill were rolled back in 2008, President Obama used the 2012 NDAA to further strengthen the Executive offices ability to declare Martial Law and added provisions that would allow military troops to detain U.S. citizens without a trial.
jessica
lincoln didn't "suspend the entire constitution". but, he had a war in front of him, which allowed him the constitutional prerequisite to suspend the rule of law - whether you like that or not. his declaration of martial law was, in fact, constitutional - and it was limited by congress.
you can't just declare martial law because you feel like it. nor can you suspend the constitution via executive order. the ndaa is a troubling piece of legislation, but it does not remove the basic necessity of war before martial law can be declared. nor does it remove congressional oversight.
i don't believe that my time is well spent in arguing the specifics of constitutional law with paid propagandists. you can choose to listen to me or to ignore me.
SneaksterMK
Kyle literally said it in the video though just because you don't wanna answer the question doesn't mean it doesn't exist since it's reality that Clinton or trump WILL (sadly) become POTUS
jessica
"i don't care which one wins - and neither should you!" is a valid answer. you might not like it. but it's not dodging anything.
i honestly think trump will be less interventionist, and i think that's a good thing. i'm not afraid of the word "isolationist". but, hillary will probably be a little bit more likely to push for deficit spending, which is also a good thing considering we're still on the brink of recession because of a continued deficit of government spending. so, they both have very weak upsides.
neither of the weak upsides overpower the awful downsides. they're equally terrible with all kinds of shit across the spectrum.
you could look at like this:
1) if you want to stop hillary from starting world war three, vote for trump.
2) if you want to stop trump from initiating an american perestroika, vote for hillary.
you're supposed to think one is better than the other?
no. not every set is well-ordered...
SneaksterMK
kyles gonna upload a video tomorrow about Jill stein and the lesser of two evils where he's gonna bring up even more great points
jessica
any reasonable approach to this would have to break it down issue-by-issue and concede that, if she is a lesser evil at all, it's pretty close to a 50/50 split.
on a hundred random issues, it's going to work out something like 53-47 in her favour.
again: it's by no means obvious. if you want to win this argument, you have to make it first.
SneaksterMK
except one believes in climate change and the other thinks it's a hoax. Although Hillary sold fracking all across the globe she at least won't rip up the fucking Paris agreement like trump said he would. Also I don't think anybody wants another antonin Scalia in the surpreme court
jessica
i don't see any evidence based argument that would suggest that we have any reason to think that hillary would pick a less conservative judge. whether you rip the agreement up or completely ignore it is simply a matter of theatre - it's the same end result, which is absolutely no action whatsoever. empty and entirely meaningless rhetoric aside, the reality is that trump has shown more awareness of climate change through his property investments than clinton did in four years as secretary of state. neither will do anything except drill more and ship more.
at least it doesn't look like trump is taking money from oil sheiks.
SneaksterMK
yes I know they're both extremely hawkish and such a risk. But we all want Bernie sanders policies to be implemented and I think we know that with a trump presidency it would ALL go backwards and we'd have no chance but with a Clinton administration we can at least hold her accountable and we'd have a much better chance of implementing progressive policies. And I feel like climate change is such a dealbreaker to me.... Bernie said it best, we should treat it as a world war 2 style threat and trump saying its a hoax is literally going completely backwards. And I know Hillary has a CLEAR track record of going to war but Mike pence voted for the war in Iraq and trump said he was in favor of invading Iraq. Trump also says as blatant as possible that he's willing to commit war crimes without using ANY coated language... That's dangerous man I'm not comparing him to hitler but even when hitler rose to power he didn't advocate the killing of many civilians... It's scary....
jessica
but, again: trump only claims he'd like to be a war criminal. hillary clinton is the legit thing, and ought to be sent to the hague, not the white house.
puttytat007
Jill Stein is our only hope thinking she can't win is not a valid point.
jessica
well, she won't win. but you can send a message...
he can explain this away and pull stuff out of his ass all day, the bottom line is that the idea doesn't make any sense. elections are not natural phenomena that can be understood through predictive modelling, they're random and unpredictable events that can at best be guessed at a few days before hand.
an educated political analysis is far more useful than anything this guy will ever come up with. and, that's coming from somebody with advanced degrees in mathematics.
listen to the political pundits, not the statisticians. politics is not physics, and it's just stupid to pretend that it is. this is just not a math problem.
you want to look at snap polls very close to the election, not models months away from it. the role of a model in an election needs to be to properly distribute data from snap polling, not to smooth it out. so, we need to find some way to take polling a few days before the election and apply it properly to the swing states. that's what a good model can do.
trump's numbers seem to rely more on reactions to terrorist attacks than anything else. if the next few months are relatively calm, he has absolutely no chance - and that is a rhetorical term, not a mathematical one. but, you want rhetoric here, not math. don't be fooled by scientific sounding quacks. but, if we see a spate of attacks, he could win on a wave of anti-muslim xenophobia. the clinton campaign has likely calculated the opposite.
put another way: he has to find a way to trick people into making a rash and poorly thought out decision. the data is pretty clear that he doesn't have a chance, otherwise.
but, please do keep in mind that the whole basis of our economy is to trick people into making irrational decisions.
i'm not going to make numbers up out of thin air and then cite arbitrary procedures that you don't understand in order to justify them.
i think he got a bump from orlando, and then another bump from munich. munich just happened to coincide with the convention.
we haven't yet seen a factor that would give clinton a bump. but, i think that's reflective of her failure to frame the narrative. for better or worse, trump appears to be in control of the narrative. that is, the fact that it's august and we're not sure what issues might give her a bump is pretty pathetic.
there's still time for clinton to take control of the narrative, but it seems to me that this election is going to be measured in terms of reactions to global terrorism - and he owns her on that issue, whether her campaign likes it or not.
that doesn't mean he's going to win, mind you. the conservatives controlled the narrative in canada in the last election, but that didn't help them win because they were so unpopular.
this was not initially constructed as a standalone work, but it became
one almost the moment that it was constructed. there was always an
intent to combine the sexuality themed tracks together at the front of
my first record, but the initial idea was something more like
frontloading the disc than building a cohesive work. it just happened to
build itself up that way, and was truly apparent as such on the very
first listen. even the phantom of the opera cover in the middle of the
track became topical in a sort of subversive way.
i first broke the piece off into a standalone file in the spring of 2014
as a mirror image to the sequence that ends my second record, which
actually *was* consciously written as a single work all the way back in
1996 (and appears that way at the end of the very first demo tape). i
thought that if the second record was going to have an epic then the
first should as well. as the first six tracks had long been a subset in
my mind, this was a natural thing to do. the title of the track was
first published as an upload to youtube in mar, 2014 on the
deathtokoalas channel, which is now deleted.
i did not initially number these tracks as symphonies due to their
incorporation of childish vocals, although i had planned to include them
on any symphonic compilation discs, nonetheless. i saw them more as
proto-symphonies - or just as beginner epics, where i was finding my
feet but ultimately still working out ideas.
it wasn't until i finished reclaiming my 1998 demos from tape at the end
of 2015 that i realized that i could resequence my first two records
from scratch and republish them as instrumental works. the ability to
reclaim these two epics as instrumental works, and consequently as full
symphonies, followed as a corollary of this. it was consequently not
until january, 2016 that i finally elevated the instrumental
reconstruction of this recording to the level of my first official
symphony, which is where it will now exist into perpetuity: eternally,
finally.
the focus in reconstruction was to erect a final version rather than
conform to the original mix, so later versions were prioritized over
earlier ones. the first through fourth sections are very similar to the
original album mix, whereas the fifth and sixth sections have been
replaced with expanded mixes.
once the instrumental version had been constructed for the record, i
felt i had lost something by removing the vocals - or at least some of
them. in the context of the improved master, i felt an edited vocal take
could actually elevate the symphony to a different and surreal level,
if presented in the right context. this context could not be on the
record, though, which had to be fully instrumental. instead, i decided
to place the vocal reconstruction as a standalone single, with the
instrumental as a flip side to it.
this is an incredibly dense piece of music that i'm proud to finally place in the serious part of my discography.
written and demoed from 1994-1998. initially constructed in this form in
june, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. sequenced on jan
6-7, 2016 from parts that were rebuilt over 2014 & 2015. released jan 7, 2016. finalized
on july 29, 2016. this is my first symphony; as always, please use
headphones.
section one: initially written & recorded in 1997. re-recorded in
1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. remastered from various
sources on jan 6, 2016.
section two: initially written in 1994. first full recording in 1996.
recreated in mar, 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed
on july 18, 2015. sequenced jan 6, 2016. vocals added on jan 7, 2016.
section three: initially written by andrew lloyd webber. recorded in
1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. remastered from various
sources on jan 6, 2016.
section four: originally created in jan, 1998. a failed rescue was
attempted in 2013. reclaimed on july 5, 2015. expanded & sequenced
on jan 6, 2016. vocals added on jan 7, 2016.
section five: written june, 1998. reimagined june, 2001. slightly
rearranged and re-rendered at the end of july, 2014. rearranged again at
the end of may, 2015. remastered from the 2014 & 2015 sources on
jan 6, 2016.
section six: initially written in 1997. recreated in feb, 1998. a failed
rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed july 5, 2015. remixed july 12,
2015. vocals and electronics added on july 16, 2015. sequenced on jan 6,
2016.
Thursday, July 28, 2016
i can't confirm any of this, but i believe it.
"Ronald Reagan is dead, and the world is no worse off for it. At the best of times, he was an ineffectual dunce. At the worst, he was a dangerous madman who threatened humanity's very survival. He destroyed any residual respect for the presidency left over from Nixon, his moral predecessor. He created unprecedented deficits while simultaneously gutting the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. He presided over a White House famously unable to govern properly because of his abysmal ignorance and tolerance of a Byzantine mess of corrupt internal fiefdoms. His endless rotation of advisers was a contemptible assortment of thieves, quacks, hypocrites and imbeciles who regularly broke the law of the land, lied shamelessly to Congress and the American people, and hopelessly ensnared themselves in ugly webs of shady and illicit dealings. Reagan claimed to be leading a conservative revolution, but he left the presidency with America mired in debt, more authoritarian, militarized and centralized than ever before, and with a foreign policy that was the laughing-stock of the civilized world."
you're going to hear a lot of scare mongering over the next several months.
"remember when nader handed bush the election?"
i don't even care if it's true or not. the reality was that gore was just as bad as bush, which is why he couldn't sway left-wing voters.
some of you have short memories. some of you are just young. all of you should read this, to jog your memory.
reality check: al gore was 100% in support of the invasion of iraq, and was even partially responsible for it.
"So this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right. It must be an action set up carefully and on the basis of the most realistic concepts. Failure cannot be an option, which means that we must be prepared to go the limit. And wishful thinking based on best-case scenarios or excessively literal transfers of recent experience to different conditions would be a recipe for disaster." - al gore on the iraq war, 2002
jessica
has she published the changes she claims she wants? thinking back to nafta, the side agreements turned out to be toothless. i don't doubt she'll do some cosmetic changes, it's just...what are they?
levithedbag1 NO SHE HASN'T. I would say if she said one thing and did another we could hold her accountable. BUT then I realized how stupid that statement is. Somehow she has gotten away with murder and deception for more than 25 years. There has to be someone out there that can stop this Clinton Obama mafia. I just can't believe people want her for the US leader. She sold herself like a whore to other countries, countries that want us dead, and big money corps.
jessica
well, i think the media ought to ensure that she does publish these changes some time before the election.
levithedbag1 She wont tip her hand like that. Clinton's don't do accountability and truth. This whole election ha gotten so far out of hand. So comical. How in the heck has all this been allowed to happen. It's embarrassing.
jessica
if she decides not to publish her proposed changes, she should not be surprised when nobody believes her.
i do actually agree, though, that the premise of a presidential candidate claiming she has a policy that she won't tell us is blatantly absurd.
----
they got to joe. oh no! joe! say it ain't so, joe.
bluntly: i think they lied to him and he fell for it.
but, chris, you know that the whole point is to reduce the election to personalities.
this is a really bad argument for clinton surrogates. we don't all have the memories of fruit flies...
"So this time, if we resort to force, we must absolutely get it right. It must be an action set up carefully and on the basis of the most realistic concepts. Failure cannot be an option, which means that we must be prepared to go the limit. And wishful thinking based on best-case scenarios or excessively literal transfers of recent experience to different conditions would be a recipe for disaster." - al gore arguing in favour of the iraq war, 2002
here's another historical fact: as a senator in the 90s, al gore voted for the invasion of the first iraq war. unlike in 2002, this put him in the minority. and, he was arguing for regime change during the first bush presidency.
al gore was not just following the status quo on iraq. he was unusually hawkish. he didn't just support the sanctions, he argued for them.
here's an interesting question: how much influence did gore have, directly or indirectly, into clinton's vote for the war?
would gore have invaded iraq? yeah. you betcha he would have.
for those that are curious, i'm going to post the two dominant sources that i'm likely to get actual news from. i tend to watch a lot of boring, wonky stuff as well. but, what are some video news sites that i'd recommend? that i actually have clicked 'subscribe' for?
1) democracy now is really the standard news site on the soft left. but, their biases are well known and it is consequently sometimes a little bit of a problem trying to digest them as a news site rather than as a propaganda outlet. i actually didn't even really consult them at all on the primary, because i knew what i was going to get. there's a few links here and there. but, their contempt for the democratic party is legendary. what i wanted was reporting from a pro-sanders slant, and i knew better than to think i was going to get it from there. the little bit that i saw was critical of sanders for selling out - which just didn't strike me as relevant. i didn't disagree. i just didn't see the use in hearing it. sell out or not, he was far and away the most exciting thing the left had seen in decades. i didn't need a sober analysis from amy & juan.
2) the other site that i normally pay a lot of attention to regarding day-to-day news is the real news network, which is kind of a canadian thing. paul jay used to be employed by our state run media, but got fired for being a communist - or something like that. trnn is not as reliable as democracy now, but it's often more direct. that is, if you want to know what's happening quickly, trnn is often the best primer to hit.
those are the sites i would normally hit for daily news regarding things like geopolitics, not the sites i've been frequenting recently due to the primary.
i've pointed out a few times that kerry was the only modern democratic party candidate that i've supported as an acceptable lesser evil (i didn't even see gore as a lesser evil...), and i actually think he's done a truly super-human job in cleaning up the absolute disaster that clinton left the state department in. he remains probably the only person in the democratic party upper echelon that i would really seriously consider voting for. and, i've enjoyed a lot of his speeches as secretary - although i should point out that just as many of them are pretty orwellian. he's not as bad as biden on the orwellian front (at this very summit, biden had the temerity to present columbia as an example of american leadership in fighting corruption.), but he can get a little staggering sometimes. still, i find his speeches a lot more inspiring than anybody else in the club. i know that's the exact opposite of the media narrative, but that's pretty expected for me.
i watch this stuff when i eat. i don't put aside time for it. but, i think this overlaps with what i was saying about fat shaming and why it's so important that we all fat shame our kids into consuming what they need and not what they want.
to be clear.
gore: not a lesser evil.
kerry: a lesser evil.
obama: not a lesser evil.
clinton: not a lesser evil.
don't expect me to ease up on her. i keep saying it. i never eased up on obama. i never eased up on gore, either.
well, i gave obama a bit of a break for a few months after he got elected. i gave him a chance, you could say.
actually, the fact is that i don't have a driver's license.
the truth is that i've never wanted one. the reasons were always largely environmental. i always said that i may revisit the point if the infrastructure allows for electric vehicles, but i've learned since then that this was somewhat naive: the manufacturing process is awful enough that merely switching to electric is not enough of a solution. or, not for me, anyways. i wouldn't buy an electric car unless it was made from 100% recycled material.
right now, i mostly walk everywhere out of a combination of necessity and circumstance. my bicycle is out of order. i haven't prioritized fixing it because i wouldn't really use it right now if i could. that will change once they get the new bridge to detroit built.
so, fuck your cars. i don't want them. and, you shouldn't, either.
i've got a great idea for clinton to try and reach young voters in a way that naturally reflects her campaign movements: reduce her campaign to a series of reacts videos on youtube. that's what the campaign is going to feel like. so, she'd might as well go full retard...
feel free to remove this. i was really just looking for decent coverage of the primary, and this was the closest thing i could find to it. i was never really looking for a debate. i don't even live in your country. it's more that i have a tendency for procrastination and you kept throwing shit down that i felt i could make some kind of point in reacting to. so, it's more like i saw an opportunity to co-opt something - i saw a stage to rush, a platform to yell over. i was never under the illusion that i'm anywhere close on the spectrum to this channel, which i'd run into previously on multiple occasions and had largely written off as a mouth piece for the right side of the democratic party (it was all about fiscal issues...). frankly, you surprised me with your primary coverage. the recent coverage is actually more in line with what i might expect. i guess i was never here in the first place - i didn't ever even go through the symbolic act of clicking subscribe - but i'll go ahead and leave you alone, now.
Commented on The Young Turks's Discussion tab
jessica
the argument that slave conditions in the south were preferable to market labour working conditions in the north has been made by essentially every american socialist since 1850, including chomsky, zinn and dewey. it's not generally presented as an argument in favour of slavery, though - it's usually presented as an argument against labour markets.
a variation on this argument is the observation that slave owners rarely killed their property, as they were invested in it, but were more open to killing "free workers" as they could just hire another one.
----
Xavier Mahan
With Ana's definition of slavery most of us are slaves.
jessica
yeah, she kind of screwed that up. in fact, o'reilly is perverting a leftist intellectual tradition that rejects the difference between chattel slavery and wage slavery. she didn't mean it, but she's accidentally absolutely right.
My Cat's Life
Petulant millennial bernie bros would rather sink the country because they were told no once in their lives. in the real world not everyone gets a participation award.
I'm sorry but in the real word not everyone wins. You politically naive Bernie bros have found this out and now you will be responsible for the destruction of our country.
jessica
you can cry about it and call them names, or you can do something constructive to win their votes. but, you're just another dipshit whining baby boomer that's had everything handed to you on a silver platter your whole life. you can't fathom actually working for anything.
My Cat's Life
For millennial bernie bros who are politically naive who have never been told no it's a hard pill to swallow but the in the real world not ever gets a participation award.
jessica
it's really amazing to hear boomers tell younger people that not everybody gets a participation award, when they grew up in a world where everybody got a fucking house as a reward for graduating high school - and then destroyed that world to pay for cocaine. i guess all the drugs fucked their memory up, huh?
we could live in a world where everybody wins, but the boomers' parents were right - they fucked the whole thing up.
i've got a great idea: why don't we fund student loan forgiveness with social security money?
My Cat's Life
you Bernie bros are deluded. gleefully cheering the destruction of America and the rise of new fascism just because you didn't get your way once in life. wakey wakey millennials not everyone gets a gold star
jessica
trump is not smart enough to be a fascist. but, if you're educated on hillary's track record, it's a pretty apt description.
we don't really have a choice: we've been dealing with creeping fascism since the hippies elected nixon, and this election is going to carry it forward one way or another.
i mean, you can't really blame it on the clintons. the first clinton presidency is going to actually be largely forgotten, sandwiched between reagan and bush. the reagan era will be said to extend some time past 1980, hopefully ending in 2020. clinton and his legacy will be folded entirely within it.
if he's lucky he might get something like clinton-reagan. but, that will probably actually end up as reagan-bush.
Kelli Barnhouse
Bush/Chaney Bankrupted this country After They spent The Surplus President Clinton Left Them!!! President Clinton was the best President this Country Ever Had!!! Didn't You learn anything In High School History Class!!!
jessica
there's some truth to this, but nobody cares about surpluses, or whether they're based on funny math or not - nor does having a surplus imply anything positive about the state of the economy or anything positive about the state of the country.
clinton was a caretaker president that carried on the policies that were set in motion by his predecessor. this is also largely true of obama. we're due for some kind of transformative change, but it's been resisted up to this point - and will not happen in the next four years, unless it comes from trump (but i doubt this).
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
if you were to sit down and press hillary on the era, she'd sound a lot like phyllis schlafly.
fwiw, i have no problem with fat shaming. in fact, i encourage it. again: i'm an anarchist, i'm not a christian progressive. fat shaming is an example of what anarchists refer to as informal social control mechanisms. it's what we promote as replacements for state institutions. and, there's a giant level of inherent statism in erecting all these things that require policing, but are really just a lot of bourgeois fantasies and nonsense upon stilts.
--
n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-o....
i think this whole idea of comparing categories is absurd to begin with, because i don't like putting people in categories. but, being gay and being black are similar in at least one way - it doesn't harm anybody. i think we can all agree that we can't really change our skin colour (without an extreme expense). can we change our orientation? i don't particularly care if we can or not. it's the question of harm that's important.
that's standard liberalism. but, the harm principle is also very important to anarchists. there's a big point of agreement there. if you're getting bogged down in the question of choice, you're exiting liberalism and aligning with....see, there's those christian progressives again. with homosexuality, though, the harm issue is at the center of academic liberalism. it's in some ways the actual defining issue - because it's so prominent in mill.
so, what about being fat? is that a choice? probably, but who cares. the important issue to me - both as an anarchist and as a liberal - is whether it produces harm. this is a complex point, but there are a few things to think about. food scarcity. is that really an issue? well, the issue has more to do with distribution - or at least it does here. my bigger concern is health care, which is in fact scarce. when you take poor care of yourself, you do consequently harm others by wasting resources that are being inefficiently distributed. it follows that society has a valid mandate to fat shame you.
the people that call themselves liberals nowadays want to talk about individual rights theory, while ignoring the more important questions of social harm. i don't pretend i'm a liberal to start with. i'm a socialist. it's obvious how this makes sense to me. but, "liberals" have lost the plot if they think we all have the right to waste resources for no good reason.
this kind of thinking isn't actually really christian, either. it's only christian on the most base, surface level. christianity was constructed in an economy where food scarcity was a real issue - that's why gluttony is a sin.
it's more along the lines of what might be referred to as nihilism, this idea that we should just live in excess and tell everybody else to fuck off. it's utilitarianism, certainly - but basely so. satanism, perhaps, in the sense that it appeals to base, animal instincts. objectivism, in the sense of it upholding selfishness as a virtue.
but it's not a coherent liberal view (it causes social harm), a coherent socialist or anarchist view (it rejects distributive justice, if not in food then in health care) or even a coherent christian view (gluttony is sinful).
==
body temperature is 36-38 degrees celsius.
you're sweating at 25 degrees because you're unhealthy. i don't sweat at 25 degrees. i barely sweat at 30 degrees.
hypothermia sets in when your body goes below 35 degrees celsius. that's about 95 degrees farenheit.
we evolved in eastern africa, not siberia. we like it hot. if we're healthy...
ok, so i should have probably expected that i would have been a little distracted by the primaries, but this is the end of day three of aimlessness and i didn't want this at all.
i've moved my laptop back into my bedroom to re-establish a separation between play and labour. the dangerously obese, parasitic piece of shit upstairs will not relent on the air conditioner (which i'm paying for), so the heat is currently set to 31 degrees celsius - and i'm willing to increase it further. this has an effect on alertness, but it's better than living in a fucking fridge.
i still haven't heard back from the mri and it's still eating at me. but i'm at least a little more focused. i think.
i need to be a little bit more strict with myself because i want to finish what is in front of me by the end of the week so i can get all the between-things things done at the end of the month.
i just got that one. again. the reason is that you can't actually live that way.
i'll just show up to work in a skirt, right? ok, maybe that's not as out there as it was even a few years ago. here's another example that cuts a lot deeper: women just don't ask guys out.
so, why don't i show initiative? why don't i take control? why don't i be a man about it?.
whatever the answers to those questions, i think it gets the point across: you can't just be a girly dude. i think it's a lot easier to be a masculine female. you may even get a little privilege out of it. but, the premise you're throwing at me just really isn't actually feasible, and i don't think that you need to be queer to be cognizant of it.
do you know what would have actually happened had i shown up to work at microsoft in a skirt?
they'd have sent me to hr, and off to a psychiatric assessment - where i would have been given hormones, and probably the option to go on leave for a few months. i may have even been transferred.
...because it was fucking microsoft.
in canada.
it would have been a little different at a mcdonalds in dallas.
if you were to play a game of chess with hillary, she would mimic your every move until the clock runs out. absolutely predictable. so, beating her is easy: you predict that and adjust.
she may be surprisingly easy to trick into shooting herself in the foot.
dude, you gotta lay off the cheese, or something. you sound constipated as fuck.
THE MOST CONSTIPATED SOUNDING ASSHOLE ON YOUTUBE
Commented on LeafyIsHere's Discussion tab
i don't think they should ban this kid, i just think they should send his revenue to the creators of south park.
the only thing i find offensive about him is his lack of individuality & deficit of critical thinking skills.
what would be better is if he did all his videos dressed up like a sheep.
this kid doesn't smoke, either. that's bullshit. "sheepy" fits a lot better.
it's just a lot of ideas that have been put in his head with cartoons, memes and viral social media.
the sad part is that people look to him for some kind of wisdom. dude. he's a fifteen year-old kid repeating the media he was brainwashed with...
when he grows up and becomes his own person, he's going to look back at this and cringe.
“I’m not going to tell Putin what to do,” Mr. Trump said. “Why should I tell Putin what to do?”
i'm sorry. but, i like this a lot better than clinton's belligerence.
it wouldn't convince me to back trump, or vote for him or whatever else. but, the more this narrative unfolds, the less urgent stopping him seems and the more appealing the green party becomes.
i'm not giving him any credit, either. i'm blaming the clinton campaign. why is she running on such a violent foreign policy?
online polling, panel polling and all other types of polling that are not random are simply propaganda. polls of this type are designed to influence popular opinion, not to measure it, and should neither be reported on nor aggregated.
put another way, this is not actually polling at all.
that said, we may have just experienced the media's expected to shift to trump.
it's just disingenuous to expect sanders supporters to concede that the difference between trump and clinton is that great. all the language thrown around treats it as an assumption - or something so obvious that it doesn't need to be demonstrated. the basis of the push back is just simply that the case has not been made. hillary supporters are going to have to actually make that case: they are going to have to convince these people that hilllary is measurably better than trump.
it's not obvious. and you do have to make that argument.
it's just disingenuous to expect sanders supporters to concede that the difference between trump and clinton is that great. all the language thrown around treats it as an assumption - or something so obvious that it doesn't need to be demonstrated. the basis of the push back is just simply that the case has not been made. hillary supporters are going to have to actually make that case: they are going to have to convince these people that hilllary is measurably better than trump.
it's not obvious. and you do have to make that argument.
see, here's the twist: i don't think it's actually true. trump is absolutely terrible. hillary is in some ways even worse, because she's more calculated.
i have no problem spinning the language around: how can you look your grandkids in the eye and tell them you voted for hillary clinton? i couldn't.
the facts are not on bernie’s side. i don't want to pretend that i don't understand his perspective, but he's just not correct.
like, what is it. you want to vote for clinton on climate change? on immigration policy? on foreign policy? how is she better at any point along the way? i'm not even sure she supports stimulus spending, which is the one place she might be a little bit better. and, she wants to run on everything except the economy.
you have to actually have this debate, if you want to convince people. and, good luck to you.
the current approach - "have faith in the party" - is going to get the reaction it deserves.
i think that a big part of the reason that i'm floaty is the mri. it's some kind of repressed anxiety. even when i'm not explicitly thinking about it....
we'll have to see what it says. but, i guess the next thing to check is my jaw, if my ear comes back clean. but, i'm kind of still convinced there's something in there. it sure feels like it...
the other big thing i'm concerned about is if it comes back with lesions. i'm actually becoming more and more convinced that it's lyme disease. i had said i would get that checked last month, but i decided i should wait for the mri, first. short of finding a giant tumour in my eustachian tube, that's almost certainly going to be the next thing i check.
you can imagine it's a little distracting. so, cut me some slack for a few days, here.
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
there was an episode of the simpsons in the 90s, where they did a parody of the x-files....
but, this is what they're running, i think. they want to play down the political differences between the candidates and turn it into a popularity contest. remember: hillary is apparently unaware of the fact that she's not widely loved.
the thinking, though, is that if you can take the issues off of the table - or minimize them - then it gets reduced to a no-brainer decision: trump is batshit crazy and she's just a little bit crazy.
two reasons why i think they're doing this. first: she always does this. it doesn't matter who her opponent is. bernie opposes the tpp? she opposes the tpp. weasel language, but nonetheless. abortion drives the gop base? they bring a pro-life vp in. it's the tactic she always uses. second: it's actually kind of true. they are basically the same candidate, except she's a little less crazy. or at least seems that way. for the first three seconds...
i'm not convinced it's a sure loss. i mean, she doesn't have a lot of better options. she can't be alienating the moderate right. that is a sure tactic to lose, because she is going to certainly bleed on the left.
she needs some kind of sugar, there. i don't know the best way to do it...
the grievance, rachel, is that they don't believe anything she says. is hillary even her real name?
remember when the other clinton was against nafta?
and, it's not like it's some kind of error in pr management, either. you can't blame this on the primary. she's spent her whole career lying to people. now, nobody believes her. how does that saying go, when we're on to "fool me for the thirty-ninth time"?
actually, i think that this is why she has to swing right. she has a better chance of convincing conservatives than she does of convincing leftists. it's perhaps a crisis point for the democrats - in two years. right now, the goal has to be to win the election. she's not going to do that by telling lies to people that don't and never will believe her. her better chance is to lay the truth on the table and go after the right. not happy about it, of course. but, is it not obvious that she'll never convince them?
i know i do a lot of long rants, but i'm just going to leave you with a statement and ask you to keep it in mind as you see the coverage unfold. i just saw an interview at rcp with cory booker wearing a purple tie and talking about the left and right coming together. first of all, who does that remind you of? what does "bipartisanship" mean to you? but, forget about that for a minute. just remember this statement over the next several months:
hillary clinton thinks that government policy should exist independent of the election cycle - that party differences in policy creates instability that makes the country less safe and less productive. it follows that she believes that elections should not affect policy decisions.
if you're having trouble understanding things, just come back to that statement of explanation.
this is actually a great idea, and something that left-leaning governments everywhere should look into. they're arguing it will be good for the economy, and they might even be right.
i support the idea more on social engineering grounds.
if you look at a map of most of the world right now, you notice something pretty dramatic: urban areas lean towards inclusive/liberal parties and rural areas lean inwards and towards the right. ontario is no different. modernizing the rural areas could consequently be interpreted as a type of enlightened gerrymandering.
except that we need to eat, too.
i hypothesize that one of the biggest reasons that we have these divides is the insularity of rural communities. if you live on a farm that's an hour drive from any real civilization, you just don't come into contact with any kind of diversity. so, you're naturally suspicious of it - because you don't know it.
increasing internet access in rural areas is consequently a sort of window into the present for a lot of these communities, who otherwise have little access to modernity.
little access. it's not zero access. but one of the major windows into the world from these communities right now is the print media, which is dominated by the right-wing. in canada, we have the sun chain along with the national post. replacing the bottleneck on information in the print media with open internet access will broaden people's opinions.
it won't lead to seat changes overnight. it may even take a generation to have any meaningful effect. but, it may be the single most powerful thing that the left can do to break the lock that the right has on rural communities.
i've been pushing this for a while, and i'm happy to see the government pick it up.
something else that i'm in strong support of is the idea that internet lines should be interpreted as public infrastructure, like roads. so, i hope that the government hangs on to the lines, this time. we had publicly owned phone and cable lines in canada for a long time, but sold them off during the neo-liberal period. that was a big error.
whatever the russians think about trump, they hate clinton.
for example: sergei lavrov is on record calling her a war criminal.
jessica
fool me once...
i don't blame him. maximize revenue, right? and, hey - it's more legit than making money from ad revenue, anyways.
i see that you didn't like the 40 minute vlogs about music production.
so, i've given you 80 minute vlogs about music production.
Monday, July 25, 2016
a correlation is developing: trump's numbers consistently go up when terrorist attacks happen, and then fade when it's quiet. he consistently beats her on national security in polls. that might be the wild card that decides the election. and, if they figure it out, it might be the october surprise.
that part is actually clear to me. the convention was a mess. he didn't get a bump from that.....
he got a bump from the munich attack.
what's a little less clear to me is whether this is emotional or intellectual. the fact that he fades when things get quiet seems to suggest that people are kneejerking. they see an attack, they get mad, they say they want to vote for the guy that wants a muslim ban. but, then once their fruit fly length memory wipes it out, they come to their sense and realize it's a bad idea.
are they actually going to do it? what factors will work them up enough to actually pull the trigger on it? and, what's the antidote?
if trump just got a bounce, i might suspect it has more to do with the recent spate of terrorist attacks than the convention.
the last few weeks - and the last week especially - has been horrific. i don't think that trump has the answers, of course. but it's hard not to conclude that some kind of drastic action is required.
he consistently beats her on national security....
....which is why she wants to run the election on foreign policy...?
the vlog may be a little late tonight, but it is coming.
i've been noticing that the bandcamp site is getting many times more visitors than plays. so far in july, i have just over 1100 visits and just under 400 plays. one would expect the opposite. even if everybody shows up and just skips through three songs, that's still three times as many plays as visits. how can i have a third as many plays as visits? what are people doing on my bandcamp site - which has little besides a play button - if not listening?
my best guess is that this is a metric regarding just how bad the problem of bandcamp downloading is. i'd just like to make a few comments.
first: please recognize that i don't prostitute myself to capitalism by selling my labour for a wage, and i'm never going to ever again. this is a basic political position of mine. i consider it more noble to live on welfare than to sell my labour for a wage. for the same reason, i don't have a record label, and i don't want one. i don't make money through advertising, and i don't want to. i'm pushing the point out of principle: do you not think you have an obligation to pay for something if you're enjoying it? i just don't understand the thought process that would take somebody to an audio site to download a low quality file out of the stream that only exists for promo purposes, then tell me i should force people to listen to an ad for condoms if i want to eat. that's not the world i want to live in. that's the world i want to abolish.
second: there's no way around this. if you can stream something, you can pirate it. but, again: i can't understand why this is the arrangement that you actually want.
third: the pirated version that you're getting is absolutely shit. my music is very sonically complex. the 128 kbps mp3 that you're streaming is really worth what you're paying for. i have to clarify that you're not actually getting a proper representation of the sound, that way. i'm not exaggerating, either. there's a reason that i am constantly requesting that you listen to the music though headphones. if you're going to listen through a shitty mp3 (no doubt on your phone speakers or on laptop speakers), you're barely even getting an approximation of it. again, i don't understand what you're getting out of this. this isn't vocally driven music. if you're not listening to the arrangements, what are you listening to? as an example, the most recent track that i uploaded is mixed in such a way that i literally cannot hear the bass part on my laptop speakers. it's not the first time i've noticed this, either. you really need to be listening to it in flac, and through a decent setup. the stream can only give you a taste. to steal the stream is to completely miss the point.
fourth: broadly speaking, i think you're missing the point. the message that sends to me is that you don't understand the art. so, why are you listening to it? you can barely hear it, and you don't understand it.
so, it's hard for me to get angry. it's less that i feel like i'm a victim of theft, and more that i feel like i'm not getting my ideas across very well. or, maybe i am. after all, one of my main messages is the ubiquity of human stupidity. perhaps you're just demonstrating the point.
if you're going to listen to this at all, please do yourself the favour of downloading it in high quality - and listening to it through headphones. that's not a hollow request. you cannot possibly understand what i'm creating, otherwise.
the roots of this track are a variation on a common theme. this is taken
from the write-up for the initial 1996 demo version of the track:
"more
silly teenage angst, intersecting with more rejection of religion and
quite a bit of misanthropy. i may make an interesting observation or
two, but the reality here is that i sound just as brainwashed as the
masses of people i was looking down on...and if i'm going to criticize
myself, or feel embarrassed, it's on that level of a lack of
originality, rather than the actual content."
by 1998, the
lyrics had been rewritten to be a little less angsty in an attempt to
expand further on the secular humanist basis of the track. yet, i still
don't really get over the irony inherent in the track. as much as i want
to break free of mindlessness and conformity, i don't have anything
particularly original to say. worse, the way i'm saying it is cliched,
childish and kind of trite. for these reasons, i've decided to eject the
vocal mixes from the official release altogether, although they are
available here as a part of the download.
musically speaking, i
initially actually wanted this track to be the basis of something more
marketable. i remember listening to the first side of the initial demo
and lamenting that it was void of anything i could really release as a
single and then trying to come up with some kind of "jangle" or
"college" rock thing to compensate for it. in the end, the track would
warp into some kind of adult prog, but you can hear the initial buckian
template in the guitar work.
as with a number of the other tracks
from this period, i don't really want to walk anything back - i just
wish that i had articulated myself better. it's not the subject matter
that's cringey, it's the exact choice of words. yet, that's a scant
excuse, in context. word choice is what writing is all about!
the
decision to create a single for the track in 2016 was drawn out by two
considerations. the first is that there are legitimately two distinct
modern versions of the track, along with a collection of discarded
mixes, and i do feel the need to offer them together as a package, as i
have done with the other tracks. the other is that this is literally the
only song on the first demo that is not offered in this format. i felt
that it would be absurd for me to offer every track as a single except
for this one.
the lead track on this single combines the album
version with the connector that follows it on the record, which explains
the chosen release date (the actual song was completed on march 22,
1998). that connector is one of the many pieces of sample art that i had
created over this period in cool edit, using a number of basic
manipulation tactics and noise generation techniques. i had to emulate
this in 2016 in order to rebuild the record. while the result is not
identical, it is actually pretty close.
initially written in
1996. recreated in the spring of 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in
2013. reclaimed june 29, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning
electronics on nov 26, 2015. sequenced on jan 10, 2016. released & finalized on
july 24, 2016. as always, please use headphones.
regarding the subject matter of the deleted vocals/lyrics, please see the following vlog (which is also available on inriℵ0): www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhdwde1YKI&t=778s
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, drum programming, drum kit, sequencing, vocals, sampling, found sound (printer), cool edit, digital wave editing, tapes, production
1) this is the version that was sequenced for the record, before it was split into two tracks for it. initially written in 1996. recreated in the spring of 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed june 29, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on nov 26, 2015. sequenced on jan 10, 2016. https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/i-think-i-feel-much-better-now
2) this is the version that was reconstructed in 2015 from the 1998 source tapes. initially written in 1996. recreated in the spring of 1998. a failed rescue was attempted in 2013. reclaimed june 29, 2015. corrected to control for malfunctioning electronics on nov 26, 2015. https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/aliens-are-more-likely-than-god-2
i would highly advise that the clinton campaign requests that bloomberg not publicly endorse clinton.
i know she's running on the right and everything. but, bloomberg doesn't excite anybody she needs to swing. he just irritates progressive voters. it's one thing to focus on trying to win missouri, it's another to go out of your way to poke northeastern liberals in the eye like that.
new york is not in play. well, unless she bleeds dramatically to stein. which is what something like this facilitates.
my guess is it's some kind of reaction to giuliani or something.
nobody cares what rudy giuliani thinks, says or does. he's widely seen as a fringe idiot.
you know what it is, though? it's all this neo-con bullshit out of 9/11, this idea that america needs an enemy to fight against. it's right out of fucking leo strauss. so, because she buys into all that nonsense, she sees the giuliani endorsement as a threat.
there's no other rational reason why she should care what giuliani thinks at all. the state is not in play. he's not actually particularly popular, or well regarded by anybody beside the lunatic fringe on the right. it's just the narrative that came out after 9/11 about how he was some kind of leader. when? between spraying the city with malathion and pushing racial profiling from city hall? nobody actually thinks that. it was just some bullshit floated on fox news.
in fact, he's been eaten alive by somebody with some actual influence on popular opinion: jon stewart. stewart destroyed the guy. he couldn't get elected dog catcher after the hatchet job stewart did on him.
but, she doesn't have any kind of meaningful connection to popular opinion. she just gets her perspectives from these shielded right-wing think tanks, and they never really dropped the bullshit.
ok, ok - it's very deductive of me to conclude that she's bringing in bloomberg to counteract giuliani. but, i mean, do you have a better explanation? both as to why she would want to be seen in public with bloomberg, and why she would think what giuliani thinks is at all important, if the connection is actually accurate?
it's consistent, anyways. and hillary is in fact consistent - both when she's lying and when she isn't.
but, note something else: she's reacting. she's not leading. again.
"He is a very nice guy." - bernie sanders on tim kaine
but, bernie. what do you think about his policies?
"He is a very nice guy."
hey, i had a mom too. i get it.
trey parker called. he wants his show back.
what you're describing is kind of not what christianity is about, actually. at least not the american/calvinist variety.
part of the problem here is that "christianity" is impossibly vague. the different denominations are drastically different. you can't just throw "christianity" out there like it has some encompassing meaning. you've gotta be a lot more specific.
it's really just a buzz word. and people will assign just about whatever they want to it.
that's not recent, either. it's not just post-reformation. they had heretics all over the place from day one. it took them several centuries just to come up with a basic creed, and that didn't even really stick. nobody's really ever been sure what the term means.
jessica
either they got hacked, or somebody pulled funding.
i mean, if this isn't a hack, it really opens up some questions about who is running this channel. this is right-wing trash.
Giuliana Rexic
Right-wing trash? It's factual. Thousands of women are being maimed by these implants.
jessica
it's just slut-shaming bullshit.
Giuliana Rexic
WTF are you talking about?
jessica
this shit has been going on for fifty years. it's just the latest iteration of the 'contraception is unsafe' meme that the right has been pushing since the pill was patented.
Giuliana Rexic
I see. I'll let the Essure victims know that!
jessica
these people made an informed choice regarding a statistically safe means of contraception and unfortunately had to deal with an obscure defect. they're not victims of anything except bad luck. again: this right-wing catholic propaganda to make contraception seem unsafe is very longstanding.
Giuliana Rexic
They couldn't have made an informed choice when they weren't given the true risks of the product. You're all over the place.
jessica
again: this is a safe product. there's some chance you're going to get hit by lightning, but that doesn't mean you refuse to leave the house. you're dealing with the same kind of probabilities that you get with vaccination, or, in fact, with the birth control pill.
that information is available - and it's the consumer's responsibility to do that research, once the risks have been published. says who? says five hundred years of british legal jurisprudence.
so, why are they pushing this? again: it's the same bullshit that's been going on for fifty years.
what i'm pointing out is that the video is pushing a right-wing, catholic conspiracy theory. it is the same right-wing conspiracy theory you hear from people like alex jones: population control. eugenics. and, when i see that rfk, jr works for this channel, that is very suspicious.
i just want to reject this idea that tim kaine is a "safe" pick. if that argument is directed anywhere, it's at the left of the democratic party. what tim kaine suggests to me is that clinton is going to be aggressively pursuing republicans. this isn't about playing defense, it's about positioning herself in such a way that she can credibly convince conservatives that she's more aligned with them.
this is what a two party system does. if you're going to uphold a two-party system, this is what you're going to get. the democrats are never going to fight on their left because they're never going to be threatened on the left. there has to be another party there.
the reason this is so predictable is because the system necessitates it. in a two-party system, all elections are fought in the center and the nominee of the party is obligated to focus her efforts on winning votes on the other side of the aisle. that's how the system works.
again: don't keep upholding this system, then expect it to do something it's not designed to do. if you want the democrats to swing left, you have absolutely no choice but to create a party on the left for it to compete with.
